runaway

DEIMOS

The Reaper caught Auni’s light in his hands before he gazed upwards at the Harpy’s; he didn’t deserve it, more aware now than ever, little pockets of soothing, assuaging undulations still spiraling across his fingertips. The Luxere received more scratches, a small indulgent smile, before he leaned away, pressed into the bridge as if it would support him and the overwhelming, cumbersome pressure and burden racing across his existence. He wasn’t falling apart, not with all the gnarls and knots roped and corded along his presence: too many convictions, too many assurances, too many particles, too many revolutions, to sizzle and flay him alive now; but some contortions smothered and tightened, wrapped their nooses around his neck and made him remember tempests rising in the east and never bothering to set in the west. He could feel her eyes on him, and he waited for some subsequent blow, another turning point with his feet stuck on the path, sinking deeper and deeper still until he truly had no other way out. The proclamation, however quiet, stuck into his mind though, and he released a solid breath, a liberation of tension, mottled along his brow; not as reticent, not as callous, not as shackled. The warrior’s gaze, piercing and lost, roamed up to hers, and the echoes of ice once in their grasp, the mountains rising up to the sky, obliterating the heavens, resounded: too many withered and fettered sanctions in their lives, in their turmoils, in the endless destruction and mayhem. Some were of their own making, others catapulted and collided back upon them with ferocity, with deceit, with tenors of oblivion, and he’d battered against them because that was what he always did.

Her next words reverberated too, down in the filaments of his bones and skeleton, because he didn’t want to go either, but there are so many things shifting and churning on those signed names, on the promises of sedition, on the building, brewing hostilities. Of course he’d be there, tarnished and barbaric, one more brutal awakening for the world to savor, to have, to hold once more: their breathing weapon, vicious and vehement, spiraling back into the void. “I have survived worse.” They shared their vulnerabilities, a chosen, select few who had ever seen him break into fragments, who had ever seen him shaken: he did the same for her, never revealing any depths of hers to another soul: they were a pair from the summits, from the glaciers, from the haunted hills of refugees and scathing, contemptuous fools. He managed the smallest of smiles for her grim, downcast features, meant to be a joke, a way to soothe instead of rattle, but it might’ve been too late for that. “What have you been up to?”

i'm in the mood to dissolve in the sky